How to prevent a meritocracy entrenching itself
economist.com
How to prevent a meritocracy entrenching itself
1–10 of 106 posts
Re: How to prevent a meritocracy entrenching itself
#2This is really strange in my opinion. We should make it harder for rich children to get a good eduction and easier for poor children? Really?
Why not make it harder for bright students to get good grades and easy for dumb students to get good grades? That would lead to greater "equality" too.
Re: How to prevent a meritocracy entrenching itself
#3This is really strange in my opinion. We should make it harder for rich children to get a good eduction and easier for poor children? Really? Why not make it harder for bright students to get good grades and easy for dumb students to get good grades? That would lead to greater "equality" too.
The fact that someone on a site like hacker news (which I like consider are on the more intelligent side) would make a comparison like this, deeply disturbs me. We clearly have fundamentally different world views. (edit: I don't want this to sound like davidirch shouldn't have that opinion, just that it's easy to assume people will share your opinion)
I don't understand how you can be against what seems to be a completely reasonable proposition to me, that everyone should get a fair chance, regardless of where they start from.
I don't see any of this as making it harder for rich children to get a good education, except to remove situations where they currently have an (in my opinion) unfair advantage, like expensive tutoring aimed towards helping them pass exams, which is not available to many.
In fact, the precise aim here is to help bright students get good grades, and dumb ones get bad grades, which is the exact opposite of the comparison you seem to be making!
Re: How to prevent a meritocracy entrenching itself
#4When I first read the title I thought this would be an article about governments impeding meritocracy not a screed against it. I guess we are running out of problems if meritocracy is one. Lots of immigrants come here work hard and are very successful. Virtually anyone willing to work hard will succeed but people have different priorities. As for always comparing the US to Nordic countries, if you compare them to Massachusetts they look bad, if you compare them to California they look insignificant and then of course there is the rest of the country.
Re: How to prevent a meritocracy entrenching itself
#5This is really strange in my opinion. We should make it harder for rich children to get a good eduction and easier for poor children? Really? Why not make it harder for bright students to get good grades and easy for dumb students to get good grades? That would lead to greater "equality" too.
Do you also think someone should take the money away from the rich child and give it to the paycheck-baby welfare mom's dad's-run-away child?
I have noticed lots of robin hoods in the world today. Maybe a true communistic and socialistic society would work if we just gave it a proper chance? If everyone just shared one bank account, all suffering would end?
Re: How to prevent a meritocracy entrenching itself
#6This article isn't really about railing against meritocracy so much as it is about promoting equality of opportunity. I ended up agreeing with much of it, but based on the title I sure didn't expect to.
Re: How to prevent a meritocracy entrenching itself
#7This is really strange in my opinion. We should make it harder for rich children to get a good eduction and easier for poor children? Really? Why not make it harder for bright students to get good grades and easy for dumb students to get good grades? That would lead to greater "equality" too.
Do you also think someone should take the money away from the rich child and give it to the paycheck-baby welfare mom's dad's-run-away child? I have noticed lots of robin hoods in the world today. Maybe a true communistic and socialistic society would work if we just gave it a proper chance? If everyone just shared one bank account, all suffering would end?
Google "Just World Fallacy"
Re: How to prevent a meritocracy entrenching itself
#8"For instance, standardised tests were supposed to favour the brainy, but the $4.5 billion test-prep industry, which disproportionately caters to the rich, indicates that this is being gamed. Intelligence tests should be more widely used."
As if intelligence tests weren't gameable and didn't favor the prepared. What's worse is that they test a very narrow definition of intelligence. That cure would be worse than the disease.
Re: How to prevent a meritocracy entrenching itself
#9This is really strange in my opinion. We should make it harder for rich children to get a good eduction and easier for poor children? Really? Why not make it harder for bright students to get good grades and easy for dumb students to get good grades? That would lead to greater "equality" too.
None of the proposals were about that. They propose relying more on intelligence tests instead of the current SAT that can be gamed with money. Also, having varying college fees based on whether you are rich or poor also makes sense.
Re: How to prevent a meritocracy entrenching itself
#10When I first read the title I thought this would be an article about governments impeding meritocracy not a screed against it. I guess we are running out of problems if meritocracy is one. Lots of immigrants come here work hard and are very successful. Virtually anyone willing to work hard will succeed but people have different priorities. As for always comparing the US to Nordic countries, if you compare them to Mas…
Meritocracy is not a problem with government, it is the solution. This badmouthing of Meritocracy is a way for the ones who are in power but don't deserve to be there as a way of maintaining that power.
On the other hand, if you make it too easy for a young person to climb the ladder (working like a dog), than what's the point of getting to the top? There are no benefits to being there except you will be living a life with more hours at the office than ever before. The reason people work to climb the latter is because there is a reward where you can work less and tell others what to do, and they can't dethrone you.
Remove that reward, and you may find a population regarding climbing the career latter as foolishness. Why would you want to take on a second job, for no extra pay, where the workload increases exponentially with the new upstarts out of college, and the right to take it easy is gone. Like a second job at McDonalds, the moment you take it easy, you are replaced. Why strive to get that?